I am coming close to adding boost.range as a dependency to non-library parts of KActivities.

Every time I have to filter out a list, join the elements in a non-standard manner.

So far, I am resisting the temptation, but I have no clue for how long I will be able to manage it :)

I’m working on different ideas for the activity switcher for plasma 2. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much inspiration for that. The only thing I had a real inspiration for was the calendar.

I really dislike out current calendar widget. It is confusing, and the layout is overcrowded and asymmetric (in a bad way :) ). It often confuses me when it shows events - I always think everything is today.

So I made this. It is just a mock-up, no real code yet. Opinions?

I’ve been asked a few times to post the slides of my talk online. Lets hope we’ll have the videos soon as well.

The slides are now available on SlideShare.

There are quite a few nice talks in the C++ track of Qt Dev Days this year. So many that I don’t expect to move away from that room at all.

I’ll be talking about a fun and clean way to work with asynchronous APIs on Wednesday at the Cafe Moscow in Berlin. I hope I will not get sleepy after lunch.

The talk will be about dealing with asynchronous API using futures (QFuture, std::future, boost::future, QDBusPendingReply…) and continuations. It will be about inversion-of-control, variadic templates, lazy evaluation, functors etc. There will be a few c++11 headache-inducing features demonstrated.

See you in Berlin!

The summer is over, but we are only at the beginning of the wonderful Plasma2/KF5 voyage. So, what did I do so far, you ask?

A few things.

Shell switching

For some reason, I always start singing “Shell switching with my two favourite allies” when I get to think about this new Plasma mechanism.

This was the main part of my project for the summer - making the infrastructure to let Plasma adapt itself based on the environment it is running in. For the details on this, check out “Switching the Plasma Shells” post.

The main, and most fun side-effect of this work is that from now on, any QML-based application is able to access the hardware information provided by the uber-awesome Solid library, while it got even more hardware support - namely, it now detects the input devices under udev-based systems.

Activities for the new age

Porting KActivities to KF5/Qt5 was not supposed to be a part of the GSoC. The reason it came to be was that is it much more important for the rest of the development process of Plasma, than some of the originally planned tasks. Though, those are mostly done as well, but will be merged at a later stage - no point in putting finishing touches to something that is still under heavy development.

For more information about the changes in KActivities, see “KActivities for Qt5/KF5”.